No More Boats

by Felicity Castagna

  And so, after he and Jesús and Charbel had gone out, after Francis had smoked the joint that he’d picked up from a guy he used to sit next to in Mrs Ong’s Year Seven maths class, after they’d all got angry with each other and made up again and said, ‘I love you, bro,’ like drunk guys do, as they stumbled down the street, after Charbel had helped him break into an apartment block his father was building down the road to steal a jackhammer, and they’d all dragged it down the street towards Francis’ house and Francis had told him that he needed to do this by himself, after Francis had told Jesús ‘you tell Mami to come by our house tomorrow morning’ – after all that, he found himself alone in the front yard of his own home with a jackhammer.

  Here he was again: three in the morning. On one side there was that half-finished apartment block looming over their house, on the other side, Lucy’s house, old and familiar. His own home sat there solid and unmoveable, held in place between them. The street lights threw rectangular shapes across the concrete of his front yard. All the rules of daytime were gone. There was the smell of paint thinner on the brushes his dad had lined up to dry at the side of the house. That smell mixed with the herbs that grew in small pots hanging along the window frame. In his right hand the jackhammer was cold and heavy. He couldn’t be bothered to lift it up all the way so it scraped across the concrete. It sounded like chalk against a chalkboard. He couldn’t stand the sound. He watched a light flick on in his parent’s house the moment he dropped it to the concrete.

  Electricity. He needed electricity to get it going. He had forgotten about the simple details of things again. He remembered the plug at the side of the house near the bins. He could feel the concrete pulsating, already, underneath his feet as he plugged it in.

  When he started the motor, the hammer jolted through his entire body. He held it in the same spot for what felt like a really long time. When the drill bit hit the ground beneath the concrete, the concrete cracked and he could knock it aside with his foot, like scooping out ice-cream with a spoon.

  The lights in the house across the road came on. Windows opened up; faces appeared cautiously at first, then hung out shouting. He couldn’t stop. The drilling held him captive. He was drilling his way out of there. Right to the other side of the earth.

  Over the sound of his own drilling he could just make out the words ‘fucking dickhead’ being hurled at him from somewhere. His hands slipped and the jackhammer went skidding across the concrete. Its drill bit lodged itself in the house’s aluminium siding and then stopped. There was silence for a moment before he heard the sirens coming. He began to run – out of habit more than anything else, really. He made it two blocks down the street before he turned to see his father standing there, wearing only his underwear, his arms crossed, red and blue lights casting shadows over him.

  29.

  Clare arrived at Town Hall Station well before she was due at the movies, and a good thing she had started early because she’d been swallowed up by the force of the bodies shoved up against each other, taking up every bit of road and pavement so that the grey shades of the city could no longer be seen. It felt as though she had been lifted up against her will and put down somewhere unfamiliar. Up on the top of Town Hall steps a woman was shouting through a megaphone about small islands in the Pacific Ocean where the Australian government wanted to take all the refugees and lock them up in cages. It sounded like the plot of some dystopian novel and Clare wasn’t sure that she quite believed it. Next to her, an elderly woman held up a poster of a child whose face looked too old for her body. She thrust the poster into the air and screamed No! every time the speaker on the steps said anything, as though she were speaking for the girl in her absence.

  Then the crowd moved towards Hyde Park in a wave that took her with it. On one side there were the restless legs of horses, whose steel-capped hooves hit the ground with a thump that sounded like a gate being slammed shut over and over again. On the other side, the crowd screamed at the police on top of the horses. Clare stood still in the middle, closed her eyes against the people moving and pushing around her and the horses and their long legs. She felt the weight of it all, of everything, and it made her hands shake. When she opened her eyes slightly, there was a man on the ground with a bloody nose and two police officers pulling him along by his handcuffed hands. She wanted to shoot up into the sky and out of this. And then next to her, there he was, in that same 59Fifty hat. Maybe it was the same kid grown older, or maybe she was making it all up in her head. It looked like the kid she remembered from the last class she’d ever taught – the same dark shadows under his eyes, those freckles merging over the bridge of his nose, the jaw that looked like it was slightly caved in on one side. For a few minutes he had locked his arm through hers and pulled her somehow gently and forcefully at the same time towards the footpath, away from the moving stream of people. And then he had nodded slightly and left her there and she watched the crowd move forward, pulsating with all those things they wanted people to hear about the children who cut themselves in detention centres, and the men who ended their own lives by throwing their bodies onto the barbed-wire fences, and the women from those boats who washed up on the shores with their babies in their dead arms. There were thousands of them, screaming, crying, dancing, walking on their way towards Hyde Park.

  When, finally, she had made it the two blocks down the street to the theatre, she wasn’t sure how to tell Paul all the things she had seen, though he must have been part of it himself.

  He was there in the entrance, leaning against a white wall, watching George Street, where the angry traffic was just starting to move again. Clare opened her mouth and made no noise. She pointed towards where the crowds had been and Paul nodded, ‘Yeah, I was there for a while. Just listening.’ Something felt like it had snapped between them, like a warmth that was there yesterday wasn’t there today.

  And then they were sitting in the dark, just she and Paul. And even though they were alone there was the smell of damp bodies from the night before, when it had rained and people must have sought shelter here. Clare wanted to sit, alone, in the dark and damp for the rest of the night, watching whatever came next until they asked her to leave. Her fingers kept brushing against Paul’s as they reached into the giant bag of M&Ms that sat between them and waited for the previews to begin. She looked at him side-on; he looked older in this light, he had a sharper angle to his face that would have made him look dignified in a photograph.

  ‘I met,’ Clare began to say, ‘I think I met that boy Ahmed, well he’d be a man now, actually, the kid who fell over in my class. The one with the hat.’

  Paul turned and looked at her in the dim light.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose that makes sense, all that time he spent in Villawood. He’d have something to protest.’

  ‘Was he? I didn’t realise.’

  Paul looked at her, like he was searching her face for a reaction.

  ‘That’s why he had all those issues. He’d been locked up for so long. Everyone thought that you must have known…sometimes you just don’t seem very capable of thinking about people all that hard.’

  ‘I didn’t –’ Clare started to say and then looked at his lips, the steely purpleness of them in the reflection of the movie screen. She leant in further and kissed him there, gently, as though this one small act might excuse her for everything she had ever done.

  Paul rolled a single small chocolate in his mouth and looked at the screen.

  ‘It doesn’t make up for anything, you know.’

  He did, she was sure, know everything she was thinking.

  She looked at him and thought about moving in again, of putting her hand high up on his leg. She didn’t know, couldn’t think of what else could be done, but as she began to move towards him he got up, slowly, with grace, her mother might say and walked down the aisle and towards the exit.

  30.

  Upstairs, Antonio was in the bathtub. Downstairs, Rose was on the couch. Neither of them noticed that
their spaces had begun to merge. Four hours ago, Antonio had turned the tap on and left it that way, falling asleep under the stream of water that flowed across his aching leg and out of the bathtub and through the cracks in the bathroom tiles, into the floor cavity and out through the light fittings in the living room where it was slowly trickling on the floor, not so far from where Rose stood at the window, not noticing.

  Rose was looking out the window at the torn-up concrete of her front yard, imagining pulling back all that cracked concrete with a rake. She imagined she could take the front yard apart piece by piece by inserting the metal prongs underneath the cracks and pushing upwards. Antonio believed he’d been forced unfairly to the margins of something, and there were moments when, out of fear for him, she had silently agreed. He’d gone out to some wild place, so far from other human beings. She protected him, now, by not talking to him. Rose knew if she tried she would not be able to talk, she would scream.

  And because the only way she did communicate with him now was in the look on her face, she made sure not to look at him this morning, after they’d both been up all night watching the concrete, waiting for what might happen next. She knew that if he looked at her he would know that she had crossed the line fully and completely now. Rose knew she was no longer who she had been; she was becoming a different person. Someone sharper, leaner, someone ready to leave for good.

  Here was her front yard, here was her home, the one that Antonio had built for her. She thought about these things with a sense of detachment, as though they may not be a part of herself anymore. At one time it had seemed like the beginning of a whole new world, and it had been. Right now, more than forty years later, she was struck by how simple it all had been, how easy and satisfying to realise that a kind of security lay in a walk around her garden, a square brick house, the feeling of holding someone else’s sweating palm. It had seemed to promise more. Now she thought, perhaps it didn’t promise much at all.

  Upstairs in the bathtub, Antonio was dreaming of St Francis wandering in his beggar’s robes through the odd combination of summits and high plateaux and low sunken plains of the mountains of Reggio Calabria. St Francis was slim and hunched-over, quick moving, always disappearing and reappearing somewhere else. He was there between the olive and bergamot trees in Antonio’s family orchard, looking out across the Strait of Messina, leaning on his cane. He was watching for the sorceress Morgan le Fay who was using her witchcraft again to conjure up castles and boats out there, floating clear and hollow on the ocean. You never knew where they might be or what. Le Fay and her sirens were using their witchcraft to lure a hungry population out of their pensiones and into the ocean, to their death. But St Francis was here to protect them. He emerged from behind one of the olive trees and stepped into the water, turned clear and shapeless and floated towards the mirage. When he emerged back on land he was whole and hard but cold as water. He touched the faces of those villagers looking out to the sea with his icy hands and said no, don’t leave, don’t get on those boats, but they smiled awkwardly and shook their heads.

  In this dream he was back to the age of twenty-three, the year he left. The days were becoming weeks were becoming months and the wet was closing in again. He didn’t know where his brother Christopher was but he’d left his new jacket on the hook behind the door. Antonio took it off the hook and put it on. The outside was heavy leather but on the inside it was lined with soft suede; the impractical garment of a farmer’s son who did no farming. In the pocket Antonio found a wad of lira tied with a rubber band. He walked out to the balcony, a scrawny young man in a powerful coat and looked out to his father’s orchard only a few metres away. Those bergamot trees his father had spent so long tending were bloated and overgrown. Their fruit, left unpicked while in season, had fallen to the ground and begun to rot in the wet. Their house was once there, behind the orchard, the houses of their neighbours were once there too before the last floods had sent them crashing down the mountain. Everyone had travelled north. Many got on boats and travelled even further than that, out across the seas.

  He dreamt of rain. He dreamt he was back inside that apartment, packing a bag with the impractical objects of someone who had nothing: a photo of his father, a statue of St Francis, a tin of coffee. Antonio left his home in August 1961. It was the Calabrian in him. All those years of staring at water. He walked towards the main road where he would hitch a ride on the back of a truck, and then walk and then hitch and then take a train and then walk again, until he arrived at the Port of Naples where he would eventually board a boat. He did not look back except in that brief moment before he managed to flag down the truck. He looked back at those miraculous sandstone houses on the main road, the ones that were still there, after all the bombs and all the floods, and remembered the beauty in those things that didn’t wash away.

  When he finally reached the Australian Immigration Office in the Port of Naples, Antonio was still practising the words he had learnt on his long journey there. His nervous energy had dissipated, leaving him scooped out, hollow. His hands sweated in his pockets. The foreign shape of those English words sat so awkwardly on his tongue. He held them in his mouth for a few moments, knowing that when he released them they would determine the shape of the rest of his life. These were the things that broke his heart as he stood there: the memory of his mother’s small hands shelling peas, the steel grey of the sky before it rained, the knowledge of how hard it would be to become a new person in a new place, and the work he’d have to do to defend the person he would become. And now, he looked at this man at his desk, running his hand through his sandy-blond hair as though he was thinking really hard. A friend in the village had told him you needed to be two-thirds white to get into Australia but no one seemed to know what that meant. The words escaped his lips like a cough you can’t hold back: ‘I would like to get on a boat.’

  Sometimes it was that earlier self that emerged. That straggly boy, wandering the same mountains as St Francis, plotting his escape. Suddenly, he woke up in that bathtub. But he was still there in the other place with that voice that was never big enough to say no with any sense of conviction. He felt lonely and afraid. It was like being possessed by a lesser version of himself. At these times he could feel his former self pushing up against his skin from the inside, checking to see if it was safe to expose itself to the outside world, and then, just as suddenly, he was himself again. The adolescent despair sank down deep into his gut, near the base of his spine, and when he brought his hands up from the water and to his face he saw that they were shrivelled and worn. He was a man again, lying in the bathtub in the house that he had built so close to the mouth of the Parramatta River, where salt water met fresh and the boats could go no further.

  31.

  It was one of those early evenings down by the river that was so heartbreakingly beautiful it made Antonio want to swallow the landscape. One of those nights where the sun melted into the water like butter in a frying pan, and the fog rolled in close to the ground so that it felt as though he was walking through sky. Since he had stopped thinking clearly, his body had been moving without him giving it instructions, as though it was doing the thinking his mind was too muddled to do. Today, his legs took him along the path next to the Parramatta River. He walked down one side and over the Lennox Bridge and then continued back down the river on the opposite bank. He had wanted, really, to be alone, to work out his thoughts, but Nico had just shown up again, so they walked together, talking of that new boatload of 237 Iraqis which had been picked up off the coast, the ones the television said had thrown their children into the sea.

  The sound of Nico’s voice was cut by the music coming from boom boxes playing Mandarin love songs. Chinese women old and young, they were on the Parramatta Ferry Pier again, stretching from right to left and then holding their arms out slowly with care. They stretched their arms out, they pulled them back. They did it again and again until a boat appeared further down the river between the mangroves, as if it had b
een hiding there waiting to be summoned. There was the tin sound of the music clocking over in rhythms that moved to a different beat than the ones he was used to, and then Nico was saying something about all those boat people having nothing to lose and the people smugglers who were the root of all evil and then Antonio was watching the boat come in and he was looking at the bodies crowded on its front deck. They were crammed up against the railing, taking pictures of themselves and the river, talking, laughing, carrying on like they didn’t care that there were so many of them and such little room and they were about to get out, right here in his neighbourhood.

  Nico put his hand between Antonio’s shoulder blades and moved him gently forward until they were right there between the small portable bridge which had been thrown out to let the people off the boat and onto shore and where the Chinese women were holding their arms out wide and pulling them in again – beckoning everyone to come to shore. Antonio stood and watched the people coming off the boat. He could tell they’d come from many places, black people and yellow people and pale people with purple streaks of hair and then he was moving with the crowd that was boarding the boat. He hadn’t wanted to go anywhere, but now he was here standing near the doorway with all the bodies pushing, pushing against him, and he didn’t know where Nico had gone and he found himself alone in a crowd at the front of the boat where he could look through the open door and watch the captain on the bridge. Antonio watched him, this foreign-looking man with his dark, tight curly hair and his too-tanned skin. He watched him fiddling with all those dials and knobs like he was planning something, and Antonio thought of all the children on board, and all the children people had been throwing out into the sea, they were all there waiting, and he could see through the captain’s window that it had begun to rain heavily, and he knew that soon those paths by the river would become submerged in water and they’d all be stranded out here so close to land and so far away, and no one would come to their rescue.